1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a microchemical device and more particularly, it relates to the microchemical device capable of evenly feeding fluids into a reaction zone and homogenizing a substance generated in each reaction.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, so-called a microreactor for allowing fluids to react or mix each other while precisely controlling the fluids in a minute space attracts attention. However, because a volume of the microreactor was small, there was a problem that its processing capacity per unit time was low in an industrial application. For such a mass production technology, in a conventional field of chemical industry, it has been attempted to adapt by scale up of a reacting member. For the microreactor, however, because the scale is an important parameter for deciding the performance of the reactor, even though the processing capacity was raised by increasing the dimensions (volume) of the microreactor, it became impossible to perform desired reaction and mixing. Therefore, study on the mass production by simple scale up could not work.
To solve the above problem, as disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2004-243308, a mass production by so-called numbering-up, which is a strategy for increasing the processing capacity per unit time by using a plurality of microreaction members in parallel, has been studied.
The success in the above numbering-up depends on how to evenly distribute the fluid into the microreactors arranged in parallel. Usually, two or more kinds of fluid are evenly mixed at a merging member in the microreactor, however, when each fluid is not evenly distributed, it causes a problem that a product obtained in respective reactors becomes different between each other.
Unlike the distribution in the normal macro-field, the fabrication error becomes relatively large in the even distribution in the micro-field. Therefore, it is difficult to realize. To achieve the even distribution, there are countermeasures such as selecting a manufacturing method with little production error, preparing the number of pumps equivalent to the number of numbering-up or the like; however, there was also a problem that each countermeasure requires much cost.
Thereupon, attempts for evenly distributing between respective reactors are carried out such as: a structure with periodically narrowed down cross sectional areas after the merging member of the reactor as disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2005-66400; and a structure in which plural times of distributions are repeated with reducing the number of distributions at a time, instead of conducting a large number of distributions at one time, as disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2007-136253.